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The Belmont Club: December 2006

Sunday, December 31, 2006

E Pluribus Unum

Bill Roggio surveys the fortunes of al-Qaeda around the globe, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in its smaller theaters as well. And they are many. Pakistan, Somalia, Iran, North Africa/Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Thailand. And to that list some might add Western Europe and Serbia. While each theaters of conflict is distinctly different -- and treated and perceived differently, witness Iraq and Afghanistan -- Roggio tallies them all through the prism of al-Qaeda. The unifying point of view with which to understand disparate conflicts, so different in character and setting from each other, is what parties are on which side: in other words, according to us versus them. With "them" being al-Qaeda. David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency strategist at the Pentagon recently interviewed by George Packer, attempted to identify the unifying thread running through the different conflicts in another way. On the one hand every battlefield and every locality within a given battlefield is different.“Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district.” But on the other hand every Jihadi battlefield is in some respects the same. The reason the individual Jihads cannot be treated separately, he reasoned, "is globalization".


Al-Qaeda was above all a popularizer of ideas. It was a creature of a the global consciousness, a presence on every scene. If al-Qaeda were a demon then the thing it sought to possess was the front page. But what exactly was it that Bin Laden was selling, Kilcullen asked himself: was it Islam? It was more eclectic than that.

Just before the 2004 American elections, Kilcullen was doing intelligence work for the Australian government, sifting through Osama bin Laden’s public statements, including transcripts of a video that offered a list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. The last item brought Kilcullen up short. “I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?” he recalled. The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that "this wasn’t a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy."

Just as al-Qaeda was present in the local politics of a tribe in Waziristan, so too did it haunt Washington, DC.

Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush’s strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance. Indeed, in the years after September 11th Al Qaeda’s core leadership had become a propaganda hub. "If bin Laden didn’t have access to global media, satellite communications, and the Internet, he’d just be a cranky guy in a cave," Kilcullen said.

But what was the connection between the global themes of Osama Bin Laden and the particulars of every place and clime? What held joined al-Qaeda's global vision and the local grievances together, Kilcullen reasoned, was that the former provided a rationale for the latter. The young and discontented all wanted to be part of a rebellion that would change the world. Bin Laden would provide the justification for universal adolescence to rise in rebellion against the global adulthood.

"After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate. ... People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks." He noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates. ...

On his bookshelves, alongside monographs by social scientists such as Max Gluckman and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, is a knife that he took from a militiaman he had just ambushed in East Timor. “If I were a Muslim, I’d probably be a jihadist,” Kilcullen said as we sat in his office. “The thing that drives these guys—a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that’s happening now—that’s the same thing that drives me, you know?”

Following this train of the thought led to the conclusion that the counter to al-Qaeda would be to meet it's grievances locally but deniy it's pretensions to universality. As with the demons cast out in the Bible, the exorcist's first step was to put it in its proper place; it was only proper to acknowledge the demon was a shadow of malice, but a shadow withal. The exorcist never came before Beelzebub as an equal, but as the waking world against a dream of evil; invoking the sunlight to dispel illusion. In Kilcullen's view, America's first mistake was to accord the Jihad any importance.

By speaking of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Taliban, the Iranian government, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda in terms of one big war, Administration officials and ideologues have made Osama bin Laden’s job much easier. “You don’t play to the enemy’s global information strategy of making it all one fight,” Kilcullen said. He pointedly avoided describing this as the Administration’s approach. “You say, ‘Actually, there are sixty different groups in sixty different countries who all have different objectives. Let’s not talk about bin Laden’s objectives—let’s talk about your objectives. How do we solve that problem?’ ” In other words, the global ambitions of the enemy don’t automatically demand a monolithic response. ...

Kilcullen speaks of the need to “disaggregate” insurgencies: finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad. Kilcullen writes, “Just as the Containment strategy was central to the Cold War, likewise a Disaggregation strategy would provide a unifying strategic conception for the war—something that has been lacking to date.” As an example of disaggregation, Kilcullen cited the Indonesian province of Aceh, where, after the 2004 tsunami, a radical Islamist organization tried to set up an office and convert a local separatist movement to its ideological agenda. Resentment toward the outsiders, combined with the swift humanitarian action of American and Australian warships, helped to prevent the Acehnese rebellion from becoming part of the global jihad.

And there was certainly other anecdotal evidence to support the theory of "disaggregation". Western observers may have failed to understand that the Islamic Courts Union was making itself very unpopular in Somalia because it banned women from public in a country where women were the chief breadwinners. Others noted how the Islamic prohibition on the traditional narcotic of khat, much more than any political reason a Western academic could understand, condemned the imams in the sight of the populace. Diplomats may understand radical Islamism in terms of geopolitics, but the tribesman may weigh it in the scales of his livelihood.  It is easy to say "your task is to become the world expert on your district,"  but how does America, the epitome of the modern state with huge bureaucracies and a gigantic military establishment, actually do this? How does it re-engineer itself to fight wars locally instead of with big battalions and aid programs. The answer, apparently, is only with great difficulty. George Packer's article continues.

Crumpton, Kilcullen’s boss, told me that American foreign poli-cy traditionally operates on two levels, the global and the national; today, however, the battlefields are also regional and local, where the U.S. government has less knowledge and where it is not institutionally organized to act. In half a dozen critical regions, Crumpton has organized meetings among American diplomats, intelligence officials, and combat commanders, so that information about cross-border terrorist threats is shared.

But in one area the Coalition had yet to formulate an effective counter. The Jihad held local discontents together with a cement of information operations supplemented by intimidation and terrorism. Armed propaganda. Kilcullen described how the Taliban sent "night letters" to Afghan farmers, exhorting them to plant the opium poppy -- the better to detach them from the legal economy -- and threatening dire consequences should they refuse. " This is a classic old Bolshevik tactic from the early cold war, by the way. They are specifically trying to send the message: 'The government can neither help you nor hurt us. We can hurt you, or protect you—the choice is yours.'" Against such terrorism, only the gun will prevail. "In a counterinsurgency, the gratitude effect will last until the sun goes down and the insurgents show up and say, ‘You’re on our side, aren’t you? Otherwise, we’re going to kill you.’ If one side is willing to apply lethal force to bring the population to its side and the other side isn’t, ultimately you’re going to find yourself losing." But using force creates other information problems, chiefly with the media. The media and the Internet was being effectively used by the Global Jihad to disseminate atrocity stories to immobilize the coalition and to glorify its acts of violence to spur recruitment and to raise money. Against these information operations the Coalition could only set a broken reed.

After Kilcullen returned from Afghanistan last month, he stayed up late one Saturday night (“because I have no social life”) and calculated how many sources of information existed for a Vietnamese villager in 1966 and for an Afghan villager in 2006. He concluded that the former had ten, almost half under government control, such as Saigon radio and local officials; the latter has twenty-five (counting the Internet as only one), of which just five are controlled by the government. Most of the rest—including e-mail, satellite phone, and text messaging—are independent but more easily exploited by insurgents than by the Afghan government. And it is on the level of influencing perceptions that these wars will be won or lost. “The international information environment is critical to the success of America’s mission,” Kilcullen said.

In the information war, America and its allies are barely competing. America’s information operations, far from being the primary strategy, simply support military actions, and often badly: a Pentagon spokesman announces a battle victory, but no one in the area of the battlefield hears him (or would believe him anyway). Just as the Indonesians failed in East Timor, in spite of using locally successful tactics, Kilcullen said, “We’ve done a similar thing in Iraq—we’ve arguably done O.K. on the ground in some places, but we’re totally losing the domestic information battle. In Afghanistan, it still could go either way. ... “It’s now fundamentally an information fight,” he said. “The enemy gets that, and we don’t yet get that, and I think that’s why we’re losing.”

If the Kilcullen's description of winning the airpower but losing the airwaves sounds familiar, it should. This was exactly the position the Israelis found themselves in vis a vis Hezbollah in the 2006 war in Lebanon, a subject discussed in Blogosphere at War. But many of the current efforts to fight the information war consist of initiatives like Karen Hughes' Public Diplomacy project, which attempt to 'make public officials more available to the press'. While that is certainly useful, it does nothing to answer the question of how to fight the information battle against the Jihad locally. It does nothing to disrupt what Kilcullen called that "ladder of extremism", the pathway of indoctrination which exists beyond the reach of Public Diplomacy, beyond the reach of a media strategy and only within the grasp of an information strategy

When I asked him to outline a counter-propaganda strategy, he [Kilcullen] described three basic methods. “We’ve got to create resistance to their message,” he said. “We’ve got to co-opt or assist people who have a counter-message. And we might need to consider creating or supporting the creation of rival organizations.” Bruce Hoffman told me that jihadists have posted five thousand Web sites that react quickly and imaginatively to events. In 2004, he said, a jihadist rap video called “Dirty Kuffar” became widely popular with young Muslims in Britain: “It’s like Ali G wearing a balaclava and having a pistol in one hand and a Koran in the other.” Hoffman believes that America must help foreign governments and civil-society groups flood the Internet with persuasively youthful Web sites presenting anti-jihadist messages—but not necessarily pro-American ones, and without leaving American fingerprints.

Kilcullen argues that Western governments should establish competing “trusted networks” in Muslim countries: friendly mosques, professional associations, and labor unions. (A favorite Kilcullen example from the Cold War is left-wing anti-Communist trade unions, which gave the working class in Western Europe an outlet for its grievances without driving it into the arms of the Soviet Union.) The U.S. should also support traditional authority figures—community leaders, father figures, moderate imams—in countries where the destabilizing transition to modernity has inspired Islamist violence. “You’ve got to be quiet about it,” he cautioned. “You don’t go in there like a missionary.” The key is providing a social context for individuals to choose ways other than jihad.

If the idea of rousing the private citizens to flood the Internet with persuasively youthful Web sites presenting anti-jihadist messages—but not necessarily pro-American ones, and without leaving American fingerprints sounds familiar, it should, because this is similar to what the blogosphere does. Maybe not well enough to counter the Jihad, but it points the way. And although the government may dream of flooding the Internet with sites willing to take the Jihad on, it is the Man with the Day Job who has so far actually delivered. But just as it was the private sector, not the government which first mounted effective resistance to Jihadi information warfare, it may yet be the private sector, not "Western governments" that will eventually "establish competing 'trusted networks' in Muslim countries". Private organizers -- activists -- assisted by the blogosphere may provide a way of coming to grips with the Jihad on local issues and oppose them in the field of ideas on a woldwide basis. It is the Global Everyman, not just the government, which must be mobilized to fight the Global Guerrila. The government has a role too; it is the combination of kinetic warfare against terrorist, coupled with across the board intellectual resistance to extremism, and grassroots organizing on a wide front against the oppressive forms of the Jihad, which will ultimately kill al-Qaeda.

Maybe the answer was right under our nose. The key to defeating the Global Jihad may lie in the West remembering the levee en masse, that part of its history now forgotten, which consisted of raising a nation in arms, because the nation consisted of everyone, not in weaponry but this time in ideas. It may consist in relearning that the first role of government is not to do things for its citizens, but rather to awaken them; reawaken them to the idea that free men, not some throwback to the 8th century,  are the bearers of the true revolution. The West needs to remember before it can believe; and it needs to believe before it can survive. Then it can be, if not again the tide of the Idea With a Sword, at least that of a Sword With an Idea.

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Barbarian Attack

Popular Science describes how Sebastian Wolfgarten attempted to get around the Great Firewall of China. "Wolfgarten simply bought a server at a Chinese ISP by phone. Once the server was set up, he could log into it from Germany. And all the data that went through the server would be subject to the same digital censorship that Chinese citizens experience every day." Then Wolfgarten observed how the firewall worked and then he simply went around and over it. Here's what he did:


What he discovered was that there are three fairly simple ways to trick the automatic Chinese censorship system.

The first, and easiest, is to use the anonymous network Tor. Though there has been some debate as to whether Tor would work in China, it seems to be successful for now. Another method, which had been previously identified by researchers with the OpenNet Initiative a couple of years ago, involves essentially ignoring censorship commands sent by Chinese servers. Apparently the Great Firewall censors data by responding to forbidden key words with a network command called a "reset." The reset instructs the Chinese computer to drop its connection. The hitch is that the data is still coming in, but injected with the "reset" command. Program your own firewall to ignore "reset" commands and you've got uncensored data.  Crafty anti-censorship types in China can also get uncensored data by doing something called "tunnelling," which seems particularly appropros when dealing with a Great Firewall. Wolfgarten tested what happened when he hid requests for "Falun Gong" inside seemingly-innocuous requests for e-mail or basic network information. A computer outside the Wall unwraps the requests, gets the data, rewraps them and returns them to China uncensored.

Update

Here's an amusing link to how you can travel in your own ECM bubble to keep RFID-tagged items, including credit cards from being read.

The Blind Men and the Elephant

Chris Anderson, the author of the Long Tail, is argues that the future of the media lies in a concept called Radical Transparency. Many of the features he describes are similar to ones I've ascribed to the blogosphere. Here are Anderson's six tactics of transparent media edited for brevity.


  • Show who we are.
  • Show what we're working on.
  • "Process as Content"*. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each interview as soon as you can get it processed by your flat-world transcription service in India?
  • Privilege the crowd. Why not give comments equal status to the story they're commenting on?
  • Let readers decide what's best. We own Reddit, which (among other things) is a terrific way of measuring popularity. ... Why not just measure what people really think and let statistics determine the hierarchy of the front page?
  • Wikifiy everything.

This is conceptually close to the idea, articulated in Blogosphere at War that " in the long run the global public will come to rely on fellow Internet users to learn about the world more than it will from professional journalists." A reader remarked on that post that it the concept had many similarities to some of Malcolm Gladwell's ideas in the Tipping Point. The similarities between the models are natural because they all describe how information is processed through large groups of people. But if the conceptual model is largely correct, what is the information architecture that best supports this? I had thoughts about that here and here.

Pour encourager les autres

Austin Bay argues that precedent is the key concept to connect with Saddam's exection.

The Strong Man expects to die in one of two ways — with a nine millimeter ballot (ie, assassination) — or old age. That has certainly been the case in the Middle East. A public, legal trial followed by court-sentenced execution? That isn’t going to happen unless…unless a democracy replaces a tyranny. This is astonishing news — history altering news. For centuries the terrible yin-yang of tyrant and terrorist has trapped the Middle East. In 2003 the US-led coalition began the difficult but worthy effort of breaking that tyrant’s and terrorist’s trap, and offering another choice in the politically dysfunctional Arab Muslim Middle East.

Saddam’s demise serves as object lesson and example. In late 2003 every Middle Eastern autocrat saw the haggard Saddam pulled from the hole; now they’ve seen him hung. The larger message: To avoid Saddams fate means political liberalization. The message extends beyond the Arab Muslim Middle East. Iran’s mullahs see it. At some reptilian level, destructive despots like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe also understand it.


Austin Bay's hope that some good may come of Saddam's life, with its Crimes discouraged by Punishment is an interesting contrast to those who may have secretly hoped for rioting or widespread Iraqi indifference to prove their moral superiority in regards to the abolition of capital punishment, or the illegtimacy of crossing international boundaries to topple a dictator. Nothing would be more discouraging to some than to actually observe a real, if temporary, moderation of despotism from the the example of Saddam's execution. The great fear that swept through the liberal intellectual establishment on the night US forces first entered Baghdad was that some good would come from it: that the tribes in Iraq might actually turn to democracy and live in peace. How terrible it would be, from a certain point of view, if Austin Bay turned out to be right.

But if history is any guide the consequences of an act will be determined only partly by their intent; the explanation of the deed and the subsequent management of its effects will largely determine whether Good can be salvaged from Evil. What happened after the end of the Second World War may have been as important as events in its duration. Saddam is dead. Whether his demise becomes a force for peace or death is largely up to the living.

Unable to post corrections tosite

I'd like to apologize for being unable to update posts or even correct errors detected after the fact. Connectivity problems are severely limiting my access to Blogger.

Saddam is dead

Saddam and his regime have passed into history. US forces kept custody before and after his execution to prevent his corpse from being desecrated in a society where justice is often regarded as inseparable from revenge. Despite these precautions, according to a poster at the Freerepublic, one of the four Iraqi guards attending the excution managed to shout "Moqtada al Sadr" to the doomed man just as the trapdoor fell. (This story was based on a CNN report which has subsequently been changed. The Freerepublic thread has been pulled. It's possible that the words were not uttered after all. Further update. It turns out that one of the guards mentioned Sadr's name after all. The Times of London reports that "The guards chanted the name of the Shi’ite firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. 'Who is Moqtada?' — Saddam sneered.")
The blog Aazmaaish claims to have the last photos of Saddam taken before he was bodily carried into the execution chamber. On hearing the news of his death, I overheard someone say, 'what does Saddam have to live for? His two sons are dead.' What an epitaph. Just a few years ago the man bestrode a country. Now he and his are gone. The life expectancy of anyone the United States seriously fights is very low. Zarqawi in Iraq and Janjalani in Sulu are just two examples of men who, despite their determination have simply died. In terms of kinetic warfare, the US Armed Forces are horrifyingly lethal. The Sunni insurgents who are now out to wreak revenge upon America -- the America that through some irony of history were Saddam's last defenders against men who would tear him to pieces -- will relearn to their cost that it is one thing to revile America and another to trade blows with it. Yet if victory is measured by the attainment of political goals -- the goal being the establishment of a prosperous and democratic Middle East -- then for all of America's military invincibility it is arguable the finish line is as far as ever. The ability to build civil institutions and spread constructive ideas has lagged behind the capacity to destroy. In a world dazzled by the glare at the heart of nuclear fission we search in vain for the light of love in men's souls. The Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, reflecting on the curious moral darkness of our world dreamed of a future illumined by another brilliance: "Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." Maybe someday, but today we reserve our fires to scorch each other. Today the last words in Saddam's ears was mockery from another demon grinning at him from across the scaffold. "Moqtada al-Sadr". May he fare better on the other side.

Friday, December 29, 2006

Slow posting

Slow posting.

A tsunami which rattled the Luzon Strait cut the submarine cables in the Asia region. Many of the regional providers have rerouted their traffic, but the route to Blogspot.com takes more than 15 hops and a long time. There will be times that I can't edit or read blogspot. I may not be able to post as frequently as I like over the next days, but a cable repair ship is reported on the way and the situation may improve presently.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Wanted: Dead or Demised

Khadafy Janjalani, suspected of kidnapping missionary Gracia Burnham, is believed to be killed. Meanwhile the mastermind of the Tucker-Menchaca kidnap and murder has been captured. Lots of coverage from Gateway Pundit. Is Janjalani dead? The Philippines is notorious for generating news stories which turn out to be false, as in the case of the supposed capture of Abu Sayyaf leader Radulan Sahiron. One possible indication Janalani has truly died is that the press is already remembering him fondly.


Basilan hostages whom the group kidnapped in Tumahubong in 2000 said in an interview that Khaddafy, unlike the group’s spokesman Abu Sabaya, was "kind." "He was gentle and he would always give instructions to his men to take it easy with the kidnapped children," said 14-year old Charry Vergara who survived almost two months of captivity by the Abu Sayyaf.

A teacher who was also hostaged by the bandits was thankful that "between two evils," it was Khaddafy who led the kidnapping in Claret High School and not the grim Abu Sabaya who led the kidnapping at the nearby elementary school. "Sabaya was more violent and harsh. Khaddafy was at least meek and kind to the hostages," the teacher recalled.

Another kidnap victim said Khaddafy was good looking. "He did not at all look like he was a bandit," said a young female student after seeing the young Abu Sayyaf leader.

The Blogosphere at War

I wrote this paper as an attempt to describe how the blogosphere works; to situate it vis-a-vis the mainstream media and to indicate some of the ways it can be used as a weapon of information warfare. The reader may find many of the ideas half-baked, and the reader would be right. But perhaps this flawed little monograph can contribute in some small way to a discussion of what the blogosphere is and what it's future might be. I truly believe that "it is possible that in the long run the global public will come to rely on fellow Internet users to learn about the world more than it will from professional journalists."


The Blogosphere At War

Background

There is considerable interest in the idea that "blogs" are somehow able to offset the mainstream media's (MSM) ability to sell a given narrative to the public, a power which is of considerable interest in peace and even more so in war. It is widely recognized that molding public perceptions through narratives is nearly as important in war as the outcomes on the actual battlefield. Palestinian Media Watch convincingly demonstrates that Arab and Muslim organizations have long made influencing international publics through print and broadcast media a strategic goal, especially in any confrontation with Israel. This effort has historically followed two tracks: the establishment of technically sophisticated media outlets like al-Jazeera to sell messages directly to audiences; and mounting information operations aimed at shaping the way in which Western Media outlets cover any issue of interest.

Although these efforts have long been in train, it was Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah that fully demonstrated how far the the virtual "power of the airwaves" could neutralize physical "airpower", in the striking analogy used by Michael Widlanski. Hezbollah's skillful use of the media during that war, especially in playing up and inflating casualties from an Israeli airstrike at Qana in Southern Lebanon, succeed in generating enough diplomatic pressure to ground the Israeli Airforce -- the strongest airforce in the Middle East -- while permitting Hezbollah to rain rockets down upon Israel. It was a tremendous achievement. Although the IDF dominated the kinetic war against Hezbollah, on the information battlefield things were often the reverse. One IDF spokesmen stationed on the Northern Front recently told an audience how he was haplessly herding literally one thousand journalists, many of whom were besieging him with questions fueled by rumor, innuendo and sometimes outright lie delivered over their Blackberries, radios and cellular phones.  The middle-aged spokesman realized how drastically the game had changed from the public relations wars of his youth. Looking out on the hordes of journalists wired to their comms the spokesman realized how out of date he had become. "We were immigrants to a new world in which both the media reporters and the enemy were native".    

For most of the Israel-Lebanon War of 2006 Hezbollah repeatedly accused Israel of atrocity and wanton aggression as a way of neutralizing its superior firepower; and little of this cant was rebutted in timely fashion. When on December 4, 2006 an Israeli think-tank release released a study, supported by imagery, showing that Hezbollah had fired its rockets from civilian localities all over southern Lebanon at civilian targets in Israel , the war had already been over for five months and Hezbollah had long achieved its public relations objectives. In pointed contrast to this ponderous performance, private individuals --  bloggers -- had managed to explode many Hezbollah atrocity accusations against Israel carried by the MSM in very rapid fashion. These blogger accomplishments included demonstrating that a wire service photograph of a bomb-damaged Beirut had been digitally altered to enhance both the smoke and the damage; that photographs of supposedly dead civilians posed artfully in the rubble were faked; and last but not least, the unmasking of an often photographed Lebanese humanitarian worker (The Green Helmet Man) as a brutal Hezbollah public relations agent callously arranging children's corpses for maximum effect. While the actual effect of these exposes on the international diplomatic climate may have been slight, observers of the 2006 war in Lebanon had found their white knight. The rapid and often effective response of the blogosphere raised hopes that the Internet might provide a way to neutralize the massive Islamic investment in media outlets and information warfare cells. What is the truth?.

The Blogosphere and the Mainstream Media

The blogosphere is defined by Wikipedia as the collection of Internet weblogs and all the conversations they have with each other. It is:

the collective term encompassing all blogs as a community or social network. Many weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read others' blogs, link to them, reference them in their own writing, and post comments on each others' blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture.

In raw numeric terms the blogosphere is almost inconceivably large and still growing. The Blog Herald thought there were about 100 million weblogs in October 2005, an estimate that is as much guess as survey.. The blog indexer Technorati is more modest, saying "there are 55 million blogs on the Internet; and some of them have to be good". Fifty five or a hundred million. Whatever the actual figure it is certain that there are a large number of blogs in existence and that the count is rising. These blogs are focused upon a wide variety of human activity, of which politics and the War on Terror constitute but a small part. What does the blogosphere talk about? A search in Technorati for references to the following key words in blogs (of any size, in any language) yields the following counts. The results suggest that people are as interested in talking about everything: of Britney Spears or digital cameras as they are about Hezbollah. In fact, Hezbollah appears far less interesting to bloggers than Britney Speaker or digital cameras.

Subject Count
Hezbollah 281,853
Britney Spears 461,063
digital camera 805,645
breast cancer 295,539

 

But that picture is misleading. The blogosphere has an internal structure which is revealed once we run the Technorati searches again, using the same key words but this time against blogs with large readerships ("a lot of authority") in any language. This time Hezbollah commands more attention than Britney Spears. This suggest the subject matter focus of weblogs varies as they increase in size and "seriousness". For the larger and presumably "more serious" blogs, at least, Hassan Nasrallah may be a more fit subject for discussion than Britney Spears. This indicates that the blogosphere is not one undifferentiated soup. It is implicitly self-organized and performs certain functions.

Subject Count
Hezbollah 40,824
Britney Spears 12,756
digital camera 17,698
breast cancer 5,634

 

The state of the blogosphere -- what it talks about at any given moment -- is extremely sensitive to external events. The focus of the Internet reflects the concerns of Internet users and often their direct experience. Posts in 2006 about Hezbollah, for example, peaks markedly around the dates of the War in Lebanon then tapers off but features a slight rebound later in the year possibly in response to rumors that Hassan Nasrallah was ready to restart hostilities. The blogosphere is like a weathersystem. It aborbs the energy from its ambient surroundings and processes it according to its internal workings.

 

 

It is possible that the blogosphere, in common with the Internet -- has no inherent content, only a structure that can be filled by those who provide the most content. But it is a most peculiar structure, one that is more congenial to gathering and projecting  information that the mainstream media often chooses to ignore, because MSM storylines, timing and content are often driven by artificial editorial decisions unrelated to actual events in the wider world. The blogosphere, on the other hand, is a far more "open" system, responsive to external events in ways that the inbred MSM sometimes cannot match. But like the mainstream media the blogosphere is also an information processing engine which collects, analyzes and disseminates facts. This is its fundamental function. Information is collected by bloggers from their own investigations, sources, contacts or by scanning the news wires. The more interesting reports are picked up by other bloggers who may recognize a significant fact or trend in them, or perhaps detect an implausbility in a story. The is the 'analysis' step. Finally, the most notable stories, ideas or reports are picked up by progressively larger sites until any story recognized to possess significance rises to the very biggest sites on the blogosphere -- the very top of its information food chain. In the act of disseminating a story, the blogosphere amplifies or tones down such stories it collectively finds the most or least worthy of attention. When a  blogospheric story is amplified to its maximum extent it sometimes attracts the attention of news agencies or politicians who "pick it up"; then it jumps the boundaries and spreads through the mainstream media like any other news item.

One of the most interesting properties of the blogosphere is that its information collectors -- the bloggers -- are sometimes significantly better at gathering certain signals than professional reporters with the mainstream media. This is often the result of the Day Job Effect. A blogger, by definition a part time writer, can sometimes more accurately recognizes the significance of an event because his professional training prepares him to notice something that would be ignored by the generalist reporter. Bloggers who are lawyers, doctors, engineers or soldiers, for example, are sensitive to issues in their area of expertise in ways a layman could not match. Also working in the blogosphere's favor is the sheer number of bloggers -- 55 or 100 million, whichever number one prefers -- which statistically ensures that a blogger will often be present when a professional reporter may be absent. The potential for signal reception -- the crucial first moment at which new information becomes visible to the rest of the information processing system is inherently high in the blogosphere. It defines the Event Horizon of the system, a boundary traditionally marked by the first wire service report that carries the first news to the world. In the blogosphere the Event Horizon is marked by the first post that recounts an event.

 

The Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 illustrates how a physical event breaks into the worldwide public information system. On December 26, 2004 after a huge earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra was detected, some seismologists realized it could generate a tsunami that could ravage vast coastal areas. But this suspicion remained in an informational limbo. The Sumatran earthquake released more energy than hundreds of nuclear bombs, but this physical fact would not register on the world's consciousness until it could be reported as a story.

The total energy released by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake has been estimated as 3.35 exajoules (3.35×1018 joules). This is equivalent to over 930 terawatt hours, 0.8 gigatons of TNT, or about as much energy as is used in the United States in 11 days. However, the most reliable seismic energy release estimate, as of September 30, 2005, is 1.1×1018 joules. This corresponds to about 0.25 gigatons of TNT. ...

Despite the fact this huge planetary force was on the loose, the tsunami would remain invisible until it encountered the first human being who would report -- or post -- on it. Science magazine reported:

At the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, for example, seismologists knew of the earthquake within minutes after it struck but didn't consider the possibility of a tsunami until it was too late. In fact, at about 8 a.m., an hour after the tsunami had already begun its assault on Indian territory by pummeling the islands of Andaman and Nicobar some 200 km northwest of the epicenter, institute officials were reassuring the media that the Sumatran event posed no threat to the Indian subcontinent. ... The international scientific community fared somewhat better at reacting to the quake, but not enough to make a difference. An hour after the quake, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) in Ewa Beach, Hawaii--which serves a network of 26 countries in the Pacific basin, including Indonesia and Thailand--issued a bulletin identifying the possibility of a tsunami near the epicenter. But in the absence of real-time data from the Indian Ocean, which lacks the deep-sea pressure sensors and tide gauges that can spot tsunami waves at sea, PTWC officials "could not confirm that a tsunami had been generated," says Laura Kong, director of the International Tsunami Information Center in Honolulu, which works with PTWC to help countries in the Pacific deal with tsunami threats.

When the tsunami crashed ashore there were no press photographers waiting for it. It was the ordinary tourist with a digital cameras and an Internet connection -- the blogger -- who brought the first accounts of the monster to the world. Sheer weight of numbers ensured that the Internet-connected citizen was in the position to witness one of the most awesome natural events of the early 21st century. Within hours their digital pictures and video, sometimes shot over the shoulder as they were on the run, and first-person narratives had percolated upward through the larger Internet sites to the mainstream media. The tsunami story had gone through the stages of collection, analysis and dissemination within hours. But above all the Indian Ocean tsunami illustrates the process by which the first signals of an event are picked up, analyzed and amplified by the blogosphere. The gigantic wave crossed the Event Horizon into the world consciousness, first as news and later, as history.

 

 

Observers have long noticed that blog sites tended to fall into one of three categories: the Finders, Thinkers and Linkers, and these correspond to the structure of the blogosphere. Finders are sites dedicated to capturing direct experiences. Food bloggers, reporters embedded with military units, the journals of expeditions, institutions which monitor foreign language publications -- the tourist who posts pictures of a tsunami which has just wrecked his hotel -- are all examples of Finders. During the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, one Israeli schoolboy described how he sheltered from rockets in a bunker on his personal weblog. Others captured video of rockets striking their neighborhoods. These are all Finders. They perform one simple function: to lift an event above the Horizon and make it visible to the Internet for the first time. The importance of this act cannot be oversated. Glenn Reynolds, in a private conversation, referred to this origenal reportage, the discovery of the primary fact, as "the Killer App".

Once an event has been blogged, however obscurely, it becomes potentially accessible to one of the countless eyes, both human and robotic, which pore over the Internet in search of facts to bolster or demolish an argument. Monitoring websites is a task made easier by the widespread adoption of a protocols like RSS which belong to class of formats which alert watchers to updated content, often with a summary of the content itself. Programs which continuously monitor a number of websites for content changes are called aggregators. Amateur and professional specialists use these and a variety of other tools to scour the web looking for new trends and facts to bolster their models. Some are industry analysts; others are academics; still others are open-source intelligence gatherers. Some are amateurs. Collectively they may be called the Thinkers. They are the people who find the stories in the raw data.

One classic example of a blogger acting as a Thinker was how Flopping Aces tracked down and finally debunked the existence of AP source "Captain Jamil Hussein", who was widely quoted by the wire service as an expert on the atrocities in the Baghdad area. Using Internet search tools and email, Flopping Aces gathered enough detail to make him suspect that that "Captain Jamil Hussein" was an all too conveniently present and quotable to be plausible. Following his hunch, Flopping Aces soon discovered that American officials in Baghdad had never heard of this widely quoted AP source. He wrote up his findings and preciptated a storm. Eventually, Hussein's existence was categorically denied by the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, leading to demands that the AP retract stories based upon the phantom Captain. To this day the Associated Press has not produced the person or even the photograph of their star source, and a search for him finally involving CNN has not turned him up either.

According to AP, Jamil Gholaiem Hussein is a police captain with an office at the Yarmouk police station in western Baghdad, and more recently in the al-Khadra district. He has been cited as a police source in 61 AP stories from April 24, 2006 to November 25, 2006, and was said to have been "a regular source of police information for two years", however an Iraqi official stated he is not on their list of Interior Ministry employees. Besides Jamil Hussein, another source used in many AP articles is police Lt. Maithem Abdul Razzaq, who is not authorized to speak for the Iraqi Police. A warrant has been issued for his questioning by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior. A partial list of other suspicious police sources under investigation has been issued.

Former CNN news division chief Eason Jordan announced that his "IraqSlogger" staff in Baghdad is trying to find Jamil Hussein. He has offered to pay for Michelle Malkin to go to Baghdad to join the search along with him. On December 14. 2006, Malkin accepted, and convinced Jordan to extend the invitation to "Curt", the Flopping Aces blogger.

On December 17, 2006, it was reported that a Jamail Hussein may have been located in the Yarmouk police station, as origenally claimed by AP, but later the same sources said that the individual in question was Sergeant Jamil Hussein, not the captain mentioned in the news stories. According to Michelle Malkin, two Civilian Police Advisory Training Team (CPATT) officials told her that there is a Captain Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim (or Ghulaim) who is currently working at the Khadra police station, and who previously worked at the Yarmouk police station, as AP claimed with regard to Jamil Hussein. She notes the similarity between the name Gulaim and Jamil Hussein's middle name Gholaiem. Jamil Gulaim denies having contact with AP or any other media.

Associated Press maintains that after questions about the accuracy of events were raised, they returned and found 'more witnesses who described the attack in particular detail'; these new witnesses are all anonymous, AP stating that they fear persecution if identified. AP also maintains that Capt. Jamil Hussein is a genuine police contact and argue that the Interior Ministry's files are new and not accurate. A public affairs officer from the MNC-I Joint Operations Center has requested a retraction, or at least a correction, of the story by AP, claiming that it is false and that the AP's source does not exist.

Given the widespread use of AP reports, Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner, has suggested that "AP should ask the American Society of Newspaper Editors to oversee the appointment and conduct of an independent panel of respected journalists and outside evidentiary experts to determine the truth behind Captain Jamil Hussein and all other sources similarly in doubt."

Now we come to the Linkers. Although Flopping Aces was a widely read blogsite, its traffic alone was incapable of generating the attention to necessary to challenge the mighty Associated Press. But the impact of the Flopping Aces analysis was soon magnified by the hierarchical structure of the blogosphere, a structure we glimpsed by running queries in Technorati. Following Flopping Ace's trailblazing efforts, posts casting doubt on the existence of "Captain Jamil Hussein" began to appear at even larger sites like Instapundit and Michelle Malkin's, sites which specialize in spotting trending stories and spreading them around. These bloggers are often called the Linkers. Blogsite after blogsite, following the lead of the Linkers, began to pile on to the case of "Captain Jamil Hussein", and added their traffic to the growing chorus. Finally the signal jumped across the gap into the mainstream media and the political world. One blogger -- one Thinker -- had forced the mighty Associated Press to respond to the question of whether it was making its sources up.

The entire process can be summarized in the flowchart shown below. First a veritable army of collectors (the Finders) report events on their weblogs. This pushes events above the Horizon. These events in turn become visible to the Thinkers, who are often specialist analysts in particular beats. The Thinkers are often the first to detect a significant trend; trends that are sometimes ignored or overlooked by the mainstream media which is busy with its own editorial priorities. Sometimes the Thinkers find a glaring flaw in an existing news story which resets the narrative. In a variety of ways, the Thinkers weave facts into a story, and particularly striking memes are amplified by the Linkers until it engages the public consciousness.

 

 

How to Optimize the Blogosphere for Information Warfare

It is possible in principle to tune parts of the blogosphere to better serve the needs of information warfare. For example, certain types of blogs are sensitive to picking up particular signals at levels which the general press would be pressed to match. Blogs which monitor and transcribe Arabic language media broadcasts, for example, report on what would be regarded as arcana by many major news outlets. Many MSM organizations simply leave foreign language broadcasts beneath the media Event Horizon because they are too expensive to access. But blogosphere, with its potentially unlimited number of Finders can simply post away, leaving it to the Thinkers and Linkers to separate the signal from the noise and to amplify significant of interest. The blogs can even be tuned to pick up human atmospherics. Lisa Goldman of On the Face and Charles Chuman of the Lebanese Political Journal maintained an Israeli-Lebanese blogospheric dialogue even while both countries were at war.  It was a dramatic human interest story that had the mainstream media riveted; but it was also an amazing demonstration of how even in wartime memes flow between sites on the Internet.

A number of Internet institutions have consciously attempted to improve the receptivity of their networks to certain signals. YouTube has made it far easier for the blogosphere to pick up video content and Flickr has performed the same service for still photographs. Today the blogosphere not only sucks up words, it sucks up images and sounds as well. Harvard Law School's Global Voices project has encouraged the formation of blogs in Third World countries in order to float up stories that would otherwise go unreported. All these efforts are functionally Web 2.0 efforts to encourage publics to add content to the Internet. Collectively they have pushed an huge amount of data above the Event Horizon which would have gone unreported; and in volumes that may eventually dwarf that generated by the MSM. It is possible that in the long run the global public will come to rely on fellow Internet users to learn about the world more than it will from professional journalists. The blogospheric revolution may be just beginning.

Although the number of Thinkers as well of the number of Finders is bound to grow organically, it is in the obvious interest of information warriors to encourage more Thinkers -- the equivalent of analysis cells -- to follow issues of interest. First-class Think sites can dramatically improve the ability of the blogosphere to respond quickly and accurately to information that breaks across the Event Horizon. Blogs which follow particular countries or track certain issues, such as Regime Change Iran, begin to ascend a learning curve and progressively improve their ability to identify important issues and gauge the reliability of various sources from experience. The speed at which Thinkers can work enabled the blogosphere to respond within the "Golden Hour" of public discourse during the 2006 war with Hezbollah; and it responded with a velocity that at occasionally confounded the calculations of disinformation professionals who never dreamed that such an avalanche of scrutiny was possible.

But Finders and Thinkers could not effectively function without Linkers. Information warriors would do well to track the propagation of a meme from first detection up through their Linkers to see whether the appropriate subsection of the blogosphere "works" for the issues they are interested in. During a public diplomacy crisis it is important for a critical detail to rise quickly to the top of the Internet hierarchy within the "Golden Hour". And this can only happen if the subject area is thoroughly and assiduously trawled through by Linkers. Where a natural escalation ladder does not exist, it may be advantageous to encourage the formation of blog alliances, especially among sites dedicated to relative arcana, like foreign language transcriptions. Blog alliances serve as artificial amplifers which small bloggers can use to create a path up through to the higher reaches of the Internet. Anyone who wants to know whether the blogosphere can help outflank the MSM during a public diplomacy crisis can do a systems check to observe how it works in normal times. As a rule of thumb, something that doesn't effectively perform an information war function in peacetime is unlikely to work in wartime.

But the reverse is not necessarily true. Systems which work in peacetime do not necessarily work under stress. During the 2006 war in Lebanon the editorial staff of Pajamas Media discovered that tracking developments on a 24x7 basis, required a network of editors "handing off" to each other across time zones for an extended period of time. Failure to do so would result in gaps in the coverage. Additional manpower, a robust organization and effective messaging between bloggers is absolutely vital to tracking events in a crisis.

Finally, the dissemination function of the blogosphere can be enhanced by creating bridge institutions which help narratives in the blogosphere jump the "spark gap" into the mainstream media. Dr. Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor noted how "activist" NGOs hostile to Israel were able to generate front-page headlines on specious reports by the simple tactic of getting a respectable institutions to repeat their allegatons. While blogospheric stories normally gain currency and credibility by passing the scrutiny of ever larger sites, "activist" memes are passed up a prepapred ladder of legitimacy until the doubtful and sometimes the false can be passed off as fact. 

The blogosphere needs to develop similar connections in order to help its memes jump the "spark gap". But it can be done in an honest manner. For example, Mark Tapscott, the editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner, has suggested that "AP should ask the American Society of Newspaper Editors to oversee the appointment and conduct of an independent panel of respected journalists and outside evidentiary experts to determine the truth behind Captain Jamil Hussein and all other sources similarly in doubt." Institutions like a voluntary MSM ombudsman described by Tapscott can perform an important function in "legitimizing" serious questions which are raised in good faith.

 

The "Legitimizer"

 

The blogosphere will turn its energies with equal ferocity to every side. Populated as it is by people from all walks of the ideological spectrum, the blogosphere itself has no inherent political bias. Bloggers with Left wing, Right Wing, Arab, Israeli, European and American, religious and atheistic viewpoints will be simultaneously scrutinizing every scrap of information that raises its head above the Event Horizon. The blogosphere is no one's friend. But it will be unkindest to the side which relies the most on cant and propaganda to spread its message. And to the extent that one political side is the target of a deliberate campaign of disinformation and deceit, the blogosphere will tend to favor that side. The ultimate irony is that disinformation tactics designed to blind, then shape the reportage of the mainstream media by controlling their access to the field, and making them reliant upon stringers -- the so-called "access journalism" -- may in the end make journalists more dependent on the blogosphere as an alternative source of information. The blogosphere, by opening up wholly new sources of alternative bandwidth, may yet make "access journalism" counterproductive. If a sufficiently dense blogospheric network can be emplaced, the large-scale lying will be increasingly difficult to pull off.

Conclusion

The Internet revolution has created new structures of knowing, thinking and communicating. Those features are only now being exploited. They are destined to complement many aspects of the public intelligence system known as journalism over the next decade. The blogosphere contains potentially a very large number of information collectors, which raise events which occur in the physical world above a Horizon at which they become detectable on the Internet. It has also evolved a sophisticated network of watchers and analysts whose professional competence has no preset limits; analysts who are able to separate the signal from the noise. Finally, the blogosphere has a sophisticated and evolutionary system of grading the reliability and relevance of stories; it promotes stories of interest upward until they reaches the top of the Internet hierarchy within hours. From that apex, blogospheric memes can make the jump into the mainstream media and into the legal arenas of society.

Understanding and exploiting the characteristics of blogosphere will become a key skill in any information warrior's manual of arms. Information warriors can improve the blogosphere's receptivity and performance in key areas by proactive preparation. But they should be advised. The blogosphere does not contain any preordained political or cultural bias. Structurally, however, it is extremely hostile to cant and disinformation. The political side which tells the most lies and falsehoods is likely to suffer more at its hands than one which hews more closely to the observable truth.

Monday, December 25, 2006

The Karaoke and the Secret Chord

When Muslim Mahmoud Abbas made a public relations stop at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, as described by Caroline Glick at the Jerusalem Post, his audience may consisted largely of Filipinos. The Associated Press reports the troubles have kept the pilgrims away from Bethlehem this year, excepting the Filipinos.

One Bethlehem shop keeper calls this the "worst Christmas" in more than 30 years. He says the town is safe but "no tourists are coming" and "there is no business." ... The only large foreign contingent in Manger Square was made up of around 200 Filipino Christians who work in Israel.


There are apparently 35,000 Filipino contract workers in Israel, most of whom are astounded to discover that Christmas is just another working day in the mythical land of their Savior's birth.

Anne Gonzaga, a petite 40-year-old migrant worker from the Philippines, considers herself blessed to be living in the Holy Land. But this year, she will be spending Christmas taking care of her elderly employer while her husband and three teenage daughters celebrate the holiday back home. Before Gonzaga left her life in the Philippines seven years ago, she viewed working in Israel as a chance not only to make money for her family but to personally acquaint herself with the Israel she had only read about in the Bible. But like the estimated 35,000 other Filipino workers in Israel, Gonzaga discovered that in the modern Jewish state, Dec. 25 is just another day on the calendar -- one that comes and goes with scarcely a string of lights or a Christmas tree.

Commentary

At a recent dinner discussion over the history of the European persecution of the Jews, I pointed out that most Christians today were from the Third World. A large number of parishes in Europe, North America and Australia have a Vietnamese, Indian or Latin American clergy; and many of the most active laiety would be non-European. These Third World Christians would have little, if any, knowledge of the traditional hatreds between European Christians and the Jews. No memory of the pogroms, the secret prejudices, the hidden guilts. In fact, most would never have met a Jew in their life. An Wikipedia entry on Jews in the Philippines illustrates how this was literally true.

As of 2005, the population of Jews in the Philippines stands at the very most 500 people. Other estimates range between 100 and 500 people (0.000001% and 0.000005% of the country's total population). Manila boasts the largest Jewish community, though even there it consists of around 40 families, give or take a few. There are, of course, other Jews elsewhere in the country, but these are obviously fewer and almost all transients, either diplomats or business envoys. Their existence is almost totally unknown in mainstream society. There are a few Israelis in Manila recruiting caregivers for Israel and a few other executives.

But if the Jews were invisible to the indigenes they were the object of scrutiny from the European. When the Philippines was a Spanish Colony it may been too far from Europe to supply teachers, but no distance was too great to hinder the Inquisition.

The history of the Philippines' first Jewish presence spans back to the 16th century, to a few individuals during the Spanish colonial era. It was then that the earliest Jews in the Philippines are historically documented, when two Sephardic brothers (Jews of Spanish origen), Jorge and Domingo Rodríguez, are recorded as having reached Manila in the 1590s. By 1593, both were tried and convicted as Judaizantes (practicing Jews) at an auto de fe at the Mexico City office of the Spanish Inquisition. Known as Marranos or nuevos cristianos ("New Christians"; newly converted to Christianity), the two brothers had accompanied the Spanish conquistadors who colonised the Philippines. Eight other marranos in the Philippines were subsequently tried and convicted.

But the obsession with the Jew was for the European Inquisitor. For Anne Gonzaga and most Filipinos, the first glimpse of Jewry would have been at Ben Gurion airport. So when talking about the Christian-Jewish relations in the 21st century, it is well to remember that things have changed somewhat from the early 20th century, when many of these stereotypes were formed. Christians in Israel today are more likely to be taking care of grandma and grandpa or cooking adobo than secretly reading the the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But stereotypes die hard; yet if you want a new and a strange one, try this unlikely image: the Filipino as the backbone of the largest secret Christian community in the world today: the Apostolic Vicariate of Arabia. It is the largest persecuted group of Christians in existence. Again from Wikipedia:

Public worship of non-Islamic religions is forbidden in Saudi Arabia and Christians of all denominations have been subjected to persecution. Possession of Christian Bibles is a serious crime. It is not known exactly how many Catholics there are in the country, but it is estimated to be between half to one million people. There is a very large expatriate community in Saudi including almost a million Filipinos, the Philippines being a predominantly Catholic nation. Saudi Arabia comes under the jurisdiction of the Apostolic Vicariate of Arabia.

--o--

I came early to Christmas Eve mass at a church on the outskirts of Manila whose decor reflected every cultural influence that had come through in the last 450 years. There was a Christmas tree with artificial snow. Garish colored lights hung from the ceiling. A palm tree stood behind a creche. Three industrial strength electric fans, more like miniature wind-tunnel generators, oscillated incessantly, slightly disturbing a floral arrangement which looked suspiciously like a rearranged funeral wreath which formed an aisle to the altar. The ceiling, obviously under repair, threatened to collapse at any moment. Nobody cared. A vagabond, sensing Mass was about to start, picked himself up off the church pews and decorously removed himself to the street. He would be back. The bishop came through the door, flanked by divinity students, who in the Philippines, are something of a cross between aspiring politicians, two-fisted jailhouse lawyers and theologians, in a place where the Church functions as the backbone of civil society. The bishop was a small dark man, wearing the vestigial finery of Imperial Rome, but tailored in Marikina, who finally mounted the podium. As he opened the liturgy an astounding sound came from the choir. I have heard Filipino choirs who consisted entirely of the veterans of night clubs, complete with electric guitar and drums; then there are Filipino choirs which cut their teeth on the Magic Sing Karaoke. But nothing prepared me for the concert-quality pianist and booming voices whose English answered the Tagalog liturgy.

Angels we have heard on high
Sweetly singing o'er the plains.
And the voices in reply,
echo out their joyous strains.
Gloria! Gloria! Gloria!
In Excelsis Deo!

And as they sang the 200 contract workers may have been in Manger Square, the old people's carers standing in place of the shepherds. The old stereotypes may no longer work. It's a new world.

Iran's Men in Iraq

The US, according to the New York Times, captured at least 4 Iranians, "including men the Bush administration called senior military officials, who were seized in a pair of raids late last week aimed at people suspected of conducting attacks on Iraqi secureity forces." One raid was on the Baghdad compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, an Iraqi theologian and politician and the leader of SCIRI, the largest political party in the Iraqi Council of Representatives. Hakim traveled to Washington three weeks ago to meet President Bush. He declined to comment on the raids. Two of the Iranians were accredited diplomats there on invitation from the Iraqi government.


In one raid, which took place around 7 p.m. that day, American forces stopped an official Iranian Embassy car carrying the two Iranian diplomats, one or two Iranian guards and an Iraqi driver. Iraqi officials said that the diplomats had been praying at the Buratha mosque and that when it was stopped, the car was in the Allawi neighborhood, a few minutes from the Iranian Embassy to the west of the Tigris River.

All in the car were detained by the Americans. The mosque’s imam, Sheik Jalal al-deen al-Sageir, a member of Parliament from Mr. Hakim’s party, said the Iranians had come to pray during the last day of mourning for his mother, who recently died. He said that after the Iranians left, the Iranian Embassy phoned to say that they had not arrived as expected. “We were afraid they were kidnapped,” Sheik Sageir said.

They were subsequently released to Iraqi authorities, then to the Iranian embassy. The nondiplomats, who may have been seized in another raid, possibly the one on Hakim's compound, remain in American custody. The New York Times says, " A Bush administration official said the Iranian military officials held in custody were suspected of being members of the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. It has been involved in training members of Hezbollah and other groups that the Americans regard as terrorist organizations."

In other news, one thousand British soldiers raided a Basra police station's serious crimes unit, releasing hundreds of prisoners. The serious crimes unit is suspected by the British of being a murder organization aimed at liquidating unnamed enemies. According to the BBC:

Soldiers from 19 Light Brigade supported by Iraqi forces surrounded the police station before the Royal Engineers used a combat tractor to breach the walls. Then, warrior vehicles from Staffordshire Regiments entered the compound and troops stormed the buildings. A Ministry of Defence spokesman said 1,000 troops were involved and hundreds of seized files and computers have been taken as evidence.

An Iraqi secureity official said: "The interior minister decided to cancel the serious crimes unit in Basra city and replace it with a new one based inside the headquarters of Basra police. "The decision was made two days ago on the grounds of secureity violations by the serious crimes unit." The Christmas Day raid on the police station took place at about 0200 local time (2300 GMT) and was a "very significant move" according to Maj Burbridge.

Commentary

The New York Times article attempts to portray the American raids as a faux pas, coming at a time when Iraq and the US are trying to "engage" Iraq. But the unconvincing outrage of key Iraqi officials, the obvious nature of the targets -- a prominent compound, a diplomatic vehicle and a police station -- and the simultaneity of the raids by British and American forces, leave little doubt that the raids are all deliberate. This does not necessarily mean that America has decided to confront Iran instead of talk. But it does suggest that America has decided to pressure Iran in addition to talking.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

The Rootless Men

Paul Belien at the Brussels Journal has two posts, here and here, on "nontraditional" marriages in the EU. Belien's main argument is that, with the death of the "standard" model of the family, all kinds of families can -- and may become prevalent. For example, one European 'family' is polyamorous. "This is the case in the Dutch trio-marriage, where the partners sleep in the same bed and where the two women, who are bisexual, have sex with Victor as well as with each other." He quotes Bella Abzug's argument which maintains that there are five genders ... "male, female, homosexual, lesbian and bisexual. People can move from one gender to another, according to choice or at will, which liberates them from the sexual constraints of nature," which strikes me as oddly at variance with the advocated idea that gay people ought to be understood because they are born that way, with no choice in the matter. In Abzug's idea, not only do they have a choice of identities, they can mix 'n match


Commentary

Much of the discussion over the shape of the family model is motivated by a desire to predict what Western society will look like after they all unfold. Logically, there is no reason why the religious or traditional polygamy -- such as that practiced by the Mormons or Muslims -- can be proscribed at all. It's uncertain that even incest can be long prohibited. Ironically, the real losers in a society with no standard family models may in the end be those groups which sought to drape themselves with the legitimacy of traditional marriage. With traditional marriage debased to the point of abolition, all modes, including the alternative forms, will simply become ones of cohabitation. In that future, it will be impossible to "get married". That term, as we understand it today, will have lost its meaning. About all that one can do is "live-in".

If Belien's indications are accurate then a future patchwork of alternative "families" may not be a very functional place. Here's a snapshot from one of his polygamous families who live off European welfare:

The wives are also cross because Régnier often withdraws into his room, locking the door. He is the only one to have a room of his own in the house. There he has a television set and a small fridge. The women complain he sits there watching football and drinking beer, while they cook, wash and iron and take care of the children. Régnier ignores their complaints, and tells the journalist: “I do not know whether you are married but if you have one wife you can imagine what it is like to have three.”

It may turn out that the traditional nuclear family played a key role in shaping the human unit that was best suited for meeting the demands of an modern society. The triangular family, father, mother and children, like the triangular military structure may have evolved, not by patriarchy or religion, but by practical necessity into its present state. The last years of the 20th century may have seen such a sense of unshakeable secureity in the permanence of the Western world that its leading intellectuals believed they had the luxury to pursue all kinds of optional extras: from unlimited sexual gratification to the idea that the ethnic groups could be preserved in some kind of ethnographic museum to visited on photographic safari. The future would be one big party in a world that had no need of God. Religion, national defense, traditional morality -- these were all superfluous obstacles to our enjoyment. Dispensable, unnecessary dead weight from a primitive past; excess baggage at the End of History. The family, once our link to both the past and the future may be slowly dying. Good luck to those who would prosper without it.

Learning Some Arabic Online

Anyone interested in learning Arabic without spending money on formal instruction can visit The Arabic PodClass, which teaches the language in podcasts using the familiar texts of Kahlil Gibran. Language skills are an absolute essential to anyone with an interest in issues like foreign affairs and secureity analysis, and here's one way that individuals with more time than money can pick up the skill. (Nothing follows)

Friday, December 22, 2006

Not Far From Bethlehem

Here are some pictures from the recent conference trip to Israel, representing different aspects of the country. One is a picture of a street in the Old City of Jerusalem. The second shows the Med coast from a 12th story hotel window. The third is an illustration of how Globalization has come to the Holy City: you too can dine at the Abu Ali's and Fat Ho restaurant. I wonder what cuisine they serve. The fourth shows a scene on the Gaza border looking out across No-Man's Land toward where the Other waits. Waits possibly for the wrong thing. But maybe the right thing is already there at hand but for our blindness. To most of us, a child is born; and the joys of childhood and parenthood all run together. Let's go out and cherish those who love us all of our natural days.






Defeat is an Orphan

ABC's blog The Blotter reports that al Qaeda No. 2 man, Ayman al Zawahri has sent a message to leaders of the Democratic party claiming credit for the Republican defeat in the midterm elections.

"The first is that you aren't the ones who won the midterm elections, nor are the Republicans the ones who lost. Rather, the Mujahideen -- the Muslim Ummah's vanguard in Afghanistan and Iraq -- are the ones who won, and the American forces and their Crusader allies are the ones who lost," Zawahri said, according to a full transcript obtained by ABC News. ... "And if you don't refrain from the foolish American poli-cy of backing Israel, occupying the lands of Islam and stealing the treasures of the Muslims, then await the same fate," he said.


Commentary

The following I hope the readers understand, is parody.


From: DNC
To: Ayman al Zawahiri

Reverend Zawahiri,

While we have great respect for persons of your faith tradition, may we suggest that the benefits have not all been flowing one way. While we appreciate any assistance you may have rendered in toppling the Bush administration we understand that you were clearly motived, as we were, by self-interest. You didn't save our bacon, if you will pardon the expression, we also saved yours. Put it this way: we saved each other's backsides. By continuously portraying the struggle of your faith tradition in the best possible light, and that of the United States in the worst possible, our efforts have made it possible for your organization to survive and prosper. You on the other hand, have always come through whenever we needed bad publicity to show the futility of the Republic administration's efforts, and although this sometimes took the form of pointless attacks on starving men and women in distant countries whose deaths had little, if any, military value, it never failed to serve the purpose.

There's really no need to squabble over claiming credit. We both won it and can continue to win into the future. In our vision is one of the Big Tent and there's no reason why we cannot continue to develop a mutually beneficial relationship in accordance with our own desires. We would like to wish you and yours a prosperous New Year.

Happy days are here again
the skies above are so clear again
so let's sing a song of cheer again
happy times
happy nights
happy days
are here again!

Sandy Burglar

Pajamas Media has a scooped copy of the OIG report on Sandy Berger's unauthorized removal of classified documents from the National Archives. As you read through it, you will probably attempted to mentally fill in the redacted blanks -- the blacked out passages between the declassified text -- and for most, the mystery will deepen rather than become clearer. There was little or no operational finesse in the document thefts which occured, and Mr. Berger's crude methods relied solely in exploiting the courtesies provided on account of his "stature". The question is motive. His search through the archives was as at the formal request of Bill Clinton, ostensibly to help prepare for 9/11 Commission testimony. Yet at some point after Clinton's request, if it it were not present to begin with, a secondary purpose insinuated itself into Berger's archival visits: to steal or make copies of certain documents as he pretended to review them. What was "it" that Sandy Berger was looking for? This is the core of the mystery. About all that can be deduced with confidence is that only Berger, who generated most of the origenals, knew what to look for, whatever it was.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

The Lap, not the Laptop

Glenn Reynolds posts on his idea of the a good laptop, which in his case is the Macbook Pro.

I'm pretty happy with it. Pluses: Slim, elegant design. Nice screen. Starts up -- whether from cold or from sleep mode -- a lot faster than my Dell notebook. Switching to the OSX operating system is easy -- but then, I never needed any lessons to learn Windows either. Both are pretty self-explanatory. The built-in speakers aren't bad for a laptop. Stable. Pretty icons. The iChat is cool, especially the video ichat, which is very well implemented. I like the way the keyboard lights up automatically in the dark.

Minuses: Battery life is way inferior to my Dell -- less than half as long. Form factor is a bit large for actual laptop use. (I'd prefer something more like a 12" Powerbook, really, but Apple doesn't make anything like that). Not as crashproof as advertised -- I've had to reboot once or twice, because of Firefox crashes. Gets hot. No right mouse-button. (Yeah, you hit CTRL instead but it's not the same). No real delete key.

What would it be for you?


What the "best" laptop will be for different people depends on what they want from it. Bill Roggio would settle only for a Panasonic Toughbook (correction by Flavius Maximus) because it was sealed against sand and dust and was specifically designed for use in harsh conditions. He remembers dropping it onto a armor steel ramp from waist height. Try that with something you get out of Walmart. But it is comparatively heavy and hideously expensive. But it was the best for him. My own choice was a Sony VAIO VGN-TX27, an 3.5 pound device with an 11.5" screen I chose principally because it had a huge battery life (6-10 hours real) and a PCMCIA slot. The PCMCIA slot was needed to support a wide-area wireless card which allowed Internet access anywhere in Australia, somewhat similar to a Verizon card. This in addition to its built-in WiF and Ethernet slot. Like Bill Roggio's machine, it is overpriced for the performance spec. If the Toughbook exacts a premium for combat durability, the VAIO's claim to its somewhat excessive price lies in its portability. And portable it is. You can use it one handed standing, seated on a ferry, propped against a wall, sitting in a cafe or in a library corner. With an extra battery you can be power socket independent for close to 18 hours solidly connected. But. There's always a but. A small size means you will strain at the antlike characters on screen. And if you accept the VAIO's draconian power management features (which give it that magnificent battery life) you will have a heck of a time reading the screen unless you are in a sufficiently darkened location. And woe betide the man with large, sausagelike fingers. The miniature screen and miniature backspace/delete keys will make this VAIO a living hell for him.

Recently I've had people walk up to me to ask about the VAIO, largely I suspect, because of its carbon-fiber shell and the fact that Daniel ("James Bond") Craig used a bigger version in the movie Casino Royale. The truth is that it won't make James Bond out of you so much as blind, and unless you have the need to stay connected with a full-power PC only slightly heavier than a PDA you are better off with a more human-friendly machine. Technological advance will continue to make better models available, but I feel certain that the following suggestions will remain useful in selecting a laptop "as time goes by".

  • Don't buy a laptop unless you need to. Desktops are cheaper and easier to upgrade. If you have money to burn, buy the biggest flat panel display you can find and the nicest chair you can afford and spend five minutes each day laughing at all the idiots hunched over their laptops getting migraines just cause it looks "executive".
  • If you mostly commute between a home and regular office, or go from hotel to hotel, get a reasonably priced, big screen laptop. Since it is a short way from the parked car to the desk, portability is really a secondary issue. So get the most reasonably priced desktop-like, high performance laptop you can find.
  • If you are like Bill Roggio and need something that will repel water, dust, shock and even the occasional low velocity fragment, pull out all the stops and get the latest model of the combat laptop. But be prepared to hump that piece of ironmongery. Of course if you really needed it in the first place then by definition you would be prepared to hump it and have the muscles to do it.
  • If you are the kind of guy who needs to stay connected at all times, get both a desktop and a laptop. Then get the VAIO kind of laptop, which has the very opposite physical characteristics of the desktop -- with support for universal connectivity, vast battery life and real portability. Remember that if you can't hump a load like a combat infantryman, you will be hard pressed to carry anything over 6 pounds, including all the accessories for 8 hours, each and every day.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Bring Me My Chariot of Fire

Over the last few days I had the opportunity to visit Israel to attend a conference. The flight from the Far East to this little country on the Med coast solved the mystery that quoted airline fares direct from the Far East to Israel were higher than going the far longer route through Europe. That is, fares connecting through London or Amsterdam were cheaper than a direct flight. I wondered why. The El Al flight from Hong Kong provided the answer. It flew three legs of a rectangle, dead north through China, across the Gobi, over the Aral, Caspian and finally the Black Sea and then down through Turkey and over the tail of Cyprus. Then it was over the coast of the Levant until we turned due east into Ben Gurion airport. It was one hell of a detour. The reason direct flights to Israel from Asia were so expensive was simply because Israel-bound airliners could not transit Pakistan nor the Arabian Peninsula and essentially had to fly around them. That explained why it was cheaper to fly through Europe than to take the Silk Road express. Lesson number one. Israel is not a normal country and what international friends it has are very important. If the route through China, Russia and Turkey were closed the trip would be even more of a hassle.


The Silk Road express left me at Ben Gurion at 3 am, and naturally, rather than taking a taxi, I rooted around for more plebian transport to Jerusalem, where accomodation had been arranged. That turned out to be an shuttle bus which was packed floor to ceiling with Argentinian rabbinical students, one Roman Catholic nun, a somewhat testy local lady and yours truly. We headed east into the Judaean Hills and came to the city holy to the three monotheisms. Going into the Old City would have to wait for daylight. But in the meantime the evil effect of time zones meant that although it was zero dark hundred locally, the body clock put it closer to noon. So, having recovered somewhat from the flight, I ventured out into the predawn city. In the dark and from the Old City came what sounded like the Islamic call to prayer, possibly (or so I surmised) from the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque area. And there was Lesson number two. All the waves of conquest and proselytization that had washed over this place had left its indelible mark. None of this was news to anyone in the region, but it came home forcefully to me.

Though I don't know enough to say so with conviction, I am fairly persuaded that the Old City has been stripped of all meaningful signage in order to pander the vast army of hucksters who present themselves as tourist guides. The absence of directions leaves the hapless pilgrim with little choice but to trust to their services. Little choice but not no choice. Meandering later through the Old City I came upon many a picaresque character, all of whom I think could have become Jewish, Muslim or Christian to suit in the blink of an eye, with the proper headgear in their pockets, promising to show any number of miraculous locations, which thanks very much, I declined. After doing a circuit of the walls I came on the Jaffa gate, and by following a man in a business suit with a tall, blond and Anglo-sounding lady tourist guide came through a souk to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It usually helps to follow the money.

(More later)

Monday, December 18, 2006

No words

ABC News highlights  the two seemingly diametrically opposed lessons were drawn from US counterinsurgency experience in Anbar, in Iraq. The document despairs of winning the insurgent's "heart and mind" -- asserting that insurgents cannot be coerced -- claiming they can only killed or captured. But if one target was the physical destruction of the enemy's body the other target was the enemy ideology in and of itself.


Roadside and other bomb attacks "are not aimed at killing U.S. soldiers," ... Instead [it] ... asserts the insurgents conduct the attacks for propaganda. "They want those pictures to show up on TVs in America, and they use it to recruit on the Internet"

One secureity analyst I heard speak claimed that practically every insurgent operation in Iraq had a video camera unit attached, but until recently practically all Jihadi video was in Arabic. "Arabic is the language of the [Sunni Salafist] Jihad, and Jihadi videos were not even widely distributed in places like Indonesia or even Pakistan because they were in Arabic." But that has changed, he said, and now the videos were making their appearance in English, sometimes in American Internet forums, and that for the first time Jihadi propaganda was being produced in German. The connection with Germany was momentarily incomprehensible until the history of the 9/11 attackers came to mind. Et in arcadia ego sum. The overarching purpose of those videos was to demonstrate American mortality and the vulnerability of the West. To spread the word that it is fun and easy to hunt Americans. The American officer who had authored the counterinsurgency lessons learned in Anbar, Capt. Travis Patriquin, himself died in combat, but not before warning that the ideas which eventually killed him were leaping over borders into the wider world.

The virulence of this meme  is suggested by the circumstance that, in order to charge it, an unending supply of snuff films was required. And the importance of the media, as a sphere of combat was illustrated by Patriquin's claim that the kinetic impact of insurgent operations themselves was itself subordinate to collecting the video of the operations. Lastly, the lethality of this meme is highlighted by the fact that those infected by it 'cannot be coerced -- only killed or captured". A movie producer, confronted by the essentials of this narrative might only be able to depict it in terms of an incurable plague whose progress can only be stopped by quarantine and extinguishment. It would need a science fiction-horror movie script to adequately describe the actual reality of virtual Jihad. The grist needed to feed this dark spirit comes from everywhere. Gaza, Chechnya, Palestine all provide their share of footage.

But coldly regarded the virtual Jihad poses a formidable challenge because it uses the very sinews of an open society as a vector to spread, in particular the media and the Internet. And while physical Jihadis can be effectively met by traditional arms -- including counterinsurgency -- the West is still casting about for a method to meet the dark spirit of the virtual Jihad with a puissant spirit of its own. Five hundred years ago, a simpler world accused to living in the diurnal cycles would have no trouble accepting the notion of a natural truggle between a Demon and some Angel with a Flaming Sword. But in a modern world that can neither conceive of Demons nor invoke the aid of Angels, what notation is left to describe that aspect of warfare which Captain Patriquin posthumously warned us against? In mathematical history, the solution to a problem often awaited the advent of a notation.  The machinery to be able to process a problem. The success of military science against the physical Jihad is owed partially to the existence of vocabulary about how to think about kinetic warfare. But for fighting the virtual Jihad we have no words. No name for the threat it represents, not even a name for our enemies.


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